As we crossed the tracks by the railroad station, only two long blocks from “our house” in the old days, I began to recognize familiar landmarks. At the first corner beyond the station where I always turned north had been four young trees and here now were four quite large ones. I was convinced they were the same. Looking up the street north I recognized the open common still intact, and as we neared the house the identical hay press, if you please, newly covered with tin and perhaps otherwise repaired, but standing close to the tracks, where formerly the hay was loaded onto cars. By the sounds issuing from it, it must have been busy indeed. At the spot where we now were at the moment should have been Bowles' house, a low, one story yellow affair, but now only a patch of weeds and a broken well top indicated that a house had once stood there. Looking quickly for “our house” I distinguished it, one of a row of seemingly new and much poorer ones, but this older house was still the best of them all. Beyond, where Mrs. Hudson’s house should have been and the great elm, and the Poe-like slaughter-house, was nothing but a railroad track curving Y-fashion and joining another which ran where once the slaughter-house hollow had been. There was no hollow any more, no tree, no nothing. Only a right-angled railroad track or switching Y.
My field of clover!
It was an unkempt weed patch, small, disreputable, disillusionizing—a thing that had never been large at all or had shrunk to insignificant proportions. My tree—the column of the brooding hawk—it was gone. There was no fine fecund truck patch alongside our house, where once we had raised corn, potatoes, peas, onions, beans—almost our total summer and winter fare. Three other small shabby houses and their grounds occupied the field we had cultivated. I realized now in looking at this what an earnest, industrious woman my mother must have been.
A band of ragamuffin children were playing out in front, children with bare legs, bare arms, in most cases half bare bodies, and so dirty! When they saw our car they gathered in a group and surveyed us. One of the littlest of them had a sore-eyed puppy elevated to his loving breast. It was a “poor white trash” neighborhood.
MY FATHER'S MILL
Sullivan, Indiana
“My brother’s got tabuckalosis of the bones,” one little girl said to me, nodding at a skimpy, distrait looking youth who stood to one side, rather pleased than not that his ailment should attract so much attention.
“Oh, no,” I said, “surely not. He doesn’t look as though he had anything but a good appetite, does he, Franklin?”
“Certainly not,” replied the latter cheerfully.
The youth gazed at me solemnly.